Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe ...

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Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe Lorraine Daston Introduction: Facts versus Evidence According to a commonplace view, facts are evidence in potentia: mustered in an argument, deduced from a theory, or simply arranged in a pattern, they shed their proverbial obstinacy and help with the work of proof and disproof. However, in modern usage facts and evidence are nonetheless distinct categories, and crucially so. On their own, facts are notoriously inert-"angular," "stubborn," or even "nasty" in their resistance to interpretation and inference. They are robust in their existence and opaque in their meaning. Only when enlisted in the service of a claim or a conjecture do they become evidence, or facts with significance. Evidence might be described as facts hammered into signposts, which point beyond themselves and their sheer, brute thingness to states of affairs to which we have no direct access: the clues pertaining to a crime committed without witnesses, the observations testing a theory about the true configuration of the solar system or the workings of the mind, the ruins of a civilization that vanished millennia ago, the indices that predict the future. On this view, facts owe no permanent allegiance to any of the schemes into which they are impressed as evidence. They are the mercenary soldiers of argument, ready to enlist in yours or mine, wherever the evidentiary fit is best. It is exactly this fickle independence that makes I am grateful to William Clark, Klaus Hentschel, and Katharine Park for their com- ments on an earlier version of this essay. Part of the research was done with the support of National Science Foundation Grant Dir-89 11169. Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991) ) 1991 by the University of Chicago. 0093-1896/91/1801-0004$01.00. 93 All rights reserved.
94 Lorraine Daston Facts and Evidence them so valuable to a certain view of rationality, one that insists upon the neutrality of facts and staunchly denies that they are "theory-laden." Were facts to be frozen into any one evidentiary scheme, fixed signposts forever pointing in the direction of a single conjecture, they would lose their power to arbitrate between rival arguments or theories. Implicit in this conventional distinction between facts and evidence is that in order for facts to qualify as credible evidence, they must appear innocent of human intention. Facts fabricated as evidence, that is, to make a particular point, are thereby disqualified as evidence. Nature's facts are above suspicion, because presumed free of any intention, but many manmade facts also qualify: the blood-stained weapon found at the scene of a murder counts as incrimating evidence as long as it was not planted there with the intention of incriminating; the unaffected simplicity of the witness adds weight to testimony as long as it was not feigned with the intention of persuading. Similarly, many methodological precautions in contemporary science, such as the double-blind clinical trial and the fixing of statistical significance levels before the experiment, were instituted to thwart the intention, however unconscious, to confirm a pet hypothesis. Note that the planted weapon, the affected testimony, the skewed empirical results lose neither their status as facts nor their potential to serve as evidence for conjectures other than those intended: so long as they do not point in the intended direction, these fabricated facts can be made to point somewhere else with no loss of evidentiary force. It is the distinction between facts and evidence that is at issue, not the reality of the facts per se, nor their quality as evidence in general. I have sketched the well-known distinction between facts and evidence not to defend or attack it (as does a vast literature in the history and philosophy of science), but rather as a preface to a key episode in the history of the conceptual categories of fact and evidence. My question is neither, "Do neutral facts exist?" nor "How does evidence prove or disprove?" but rather, "How did our current conceptions of neutral facts and enlisted evidence, and the distinction between them, come to be?" How did evidence come to be incompatible with intention, and is it possible to imagine a kind of evidence that is intention-laden? It is my claim that partial answers to these questions lie buried in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature on prodigies and miracles. I shall argue that during this period prodigies briefly became the proto- Lorraine Daston is professor of history of science at the University of Gottingen, Federal Republic of Germany. She is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988) and is currently at work on a history of scientific objectivity.
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